There was a click and the ward door came open. The dark head of the man in the grey shirt appeared. ‘Hermione?’
‘Hi, Robbie.’
‘Hi.’ His eyes moved quickly between them. ‘I . . . Everything all right?’
‘Fine.’ Hermione gave a single terse nod. ‘Thanks. I’ll be there in a second.’
Robbie looked at Hannah appraisingly then bobbed his head back in. He stepped aside but she could see the elbow of his shirt through the glass panel. Hermione saw it as well. She stepped away from the door and put her hand on Hannah’s arm, drawing her back. ‘Okay, look,’ she said quietly, ‘you’re right, we have been in touch a couple of times recently.’
Hannah felt the confirmation as a physical sensation, cold washing over her.
‘No, it’s not that – it’s not what you think.’
‘Then what is it?’
Hermione cast an anxious glance down the corridor. ‘We were talking about Nick.’
‘Nick?’ Nicola, said the voice in her ear. It’s not her, it’s someone else, a mutual friend, an old flame.
Hermione, though, was looking at her as if she were stupid. ‘His brother,’ she said.
‘His brother? What? They don’t even talk. Why would you . . .?’
‘Because,’ Hermione said, as if it were obvious, ‘he’s about to get out of prison, isn’t he?’
Chapter Eleven
‘What about your brother?’ she’d asked that Friday night.
Her head had been on Mark’s shoulder, his skin warm and faintly damp against her cheek from the heat they’d generated in bed and the overzealous steam heating in her old building. She’d felt a tiny tug of suction as he’d turned and dislodged her, a kiss goodbye.
‘What about him?’
Happy that he was coming to Malvern for Christmas and keen to avoid making him sad by probing too deeply into his family when he’d just agreed to be thrust into the centre of hers – whom she still had the luxury of moaning about – Hannah had let the subject drop at the time, but the following morning when she’d been making scrambled eggs in her glamorous corridor of a kitchen, coffee pot balanced precariously on top of the microwave to make space for two plates side by side on the tiny patch of countertop, the White Stripes playing on wfuv with backing vocals from Mark in the shower next door, she’d thought about how his face had changed. His relaxed openness had vanished in a second, replaced by a barrier. When he’d looked at her, his eyes had been hard. What about him?
What had he told her about his brother before that? She’d stirred the eggs and tried to think back. She remembered the conversation very early on, the second time they’d met up deliberately in the city, when he’d told her that he’d lost both his parents when he was in his twenties, his father of complications after a stomach operation, his mother only a year later of breast cancer detected too late. They’d been at the Mulberry Street Bar then, his suggestion because she’d told him she loved Donnie Brasco and he couldn’t believe she didn’t know that scenes of it had been shot there. The temperature had been pushing a hundred all day and they’d sat at one of the high pedestal tables and drank glasses of beer that ran with condensation despite the roaring air con. ‘How about siblings?’ she’d asked him. ‘Do you have any?’
For a moment Mark seemed to hesitate and she’d watched as he circled the dregs of his beer round the bottom of the glass.
‘One. A brother. Nick.’ He’d looked up, expression neutral.
‘Are you close?’
A headshake. ‘We’re not really in touch, even.’
‘Oh.’ Hannah had been surprised: she’d only met Mark a handful of times but he hadn’t struck her as the type to have tempestuous family relationships.
‘There’s no drama,’ he said, ‘we’re just very different people.’
‘Is he older or younger?’
‘Younger but only a year. My mother didn’t know you could get pregnant while you were breastfeeding. That was her story, anyway.’ He’d grinned, the light coming back into his eyes, and reached for Hannah’s empty glass. ‘Same again?’
He’d returned from the bar with a snippet of gossip he’d just overheard and the conversation had taken a different tack. At that point, so soon after meeting him, she hadn’t felt it was right to press him for more information than he wanted to give, but now, the end of November, they’d been together five months and he was coming for Christmas. It wasn’t a flirtation any more, a short-lived fun thing; it was a real relationship. The idea sent a buzz through her: it was good but, she admitted to herself, terrifying too.